NFS4 Multipathing and LACP How To?

[mattlach]

Hey all,

I often use my workstation to transfer large amounts of data to and from my Proxmox server, and anything I can do to speed it up would greatly help me.

My workstation runs Linux Mint 18, with two intel NIC's bonded in 802.3ad mode with my Procurve switch.

My Proxmox server has the same thing (but with four intel gigabit interfaces).

LACP is working properly, and I have a large ZFS pool with many drives capable of both reading and writing close to a gigabyte per second.

Checking my NFS connections using mount, they are all in nfs4 mode, yet still my transfer speeds are limited to single link speeds.

Any idea what I am doing wrong? Is there an option I need to pass to NFS in order to enable multipathing?

Appreciate any suggestions,
Matt

 

[manu]

Hi Mattlach
IIRC, Multipathing is something specific to ISCSI, NFS does not have support for that.
Your LACP setup seems OK but remember LACP will only bring throughput improvement when *multiple* connections are running on the the aggregated link. A single connection will not get any faster.

 

[tschanness]

NFS 4.1 supports Multipathing. Please check if you use 4.0 or 4.1.
Using Multipath you won't need LACP.

Also: LACP does not "double" your speed, it only makes things go faster with more than one connection.

sC

/e: see https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/nfs-multipathing.22930/#post-115214

 

[mattlach]

Thanks for you help, some follow up questions if you don't mind:

NFS 4.1 supports Multipathing. Please check if you use 4.0 or 4.1.

Do you know how to check this? I was looking for an "nfs -v" or similar command, but can't find one. If I look through my mounts, they only tell me major NFS revision of the mount (2, 3 or 4) not point releases.

Using Multipath you won't need LACP.

Understood that I don't NEED LACP, but I kind of want to keep LACP around for other protocols. The links are not used exclusively for file transfers over NFS. Is multi-path over NFS explicitly NOT compatible with LACP, or is it just "not necessary"?

Also: LACP does not "double" your speed, it only makes things go faster with more than one connection.

I am aware. Been using LACP for a long time. With many VM's and containers on my server, I get a large amount of connections over the interfaces, so I'm really using it to distribute that load primarily, but I'm hoping I can also use it for NFS multipathing, now that I have everything set up.

see https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/nfs-multipathing.22930/#post-115214

Yikes,

This guy is using lots of terminology I am not familiar with. I'm by no means not network knowlegdeable, but my knowledge is on a level of "hobbyist using enterprise hardware at home" not professional.

I'll have to read up on OSPF, Quagga and a few others.

I was hoping I could just run NFS4.1 over the existing bonded interfaces in 802.3ad mode, and it would work, but it's starting to look like it might be more complex than that.

Maybe NFS4 just isn't trying to multipath it, because it just sees the bond as a single interface. Maybe there is some configuration somewhere I can use to force it to make multiple connections over the one bonded interface, and those would then use one physical interface each?